Exemplary embodiments of the invention relate generally to managing productivity, and more particularly, to methods, systems, and computer program products for managing productivity and forecasting load balance requirements.
Business enterprises are continuously looking for new and improved methods of tracking worker productivity and, if needed, adjusting their business processes in response to weaknesses discovered in an effort to maximize human resources without sacrificing quality of service. Understanding the nature of each job, drilled down to a detailed task level, along with existing or potential factors that may affect the successful execution of each of these jobs is important in order for the business to establish realistic productivity goals and set performance standards. Existing business processes have been lacking in this level of understanding, such that any performance standards established would not likely be capable of accurate measurement in terms of whether a task was successfully completed. In addition, larger enterprises have been known to incur significant difficulties in sifting through voluminous databases of task execution data and determining which task data is relevant and how the data should be interpreted (e.g., the reason a task is reported to have exceeded a set time standard by several hours may be attributed to poor worker productivity when, in fact, an unforeseen obstacle caused the time discrepancy).
Effective tracking of worker productivity is also important in order for businesses to forecast potential changes needed in workload and address these changes so that the appropriate manpower is on hand at any given time.